In 2017, the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission (MIDC) asked the RAND Corporation for assistance in determining maximum caseload standards for providers of indigent legal representation to adult defendants in the trial-level courts of Michigan. This project conducted three data collection efforts to provide an empirical foundation for these standards. The authors present recommended caseload standards based on analysis of the collected data.

For the criminal justice system to work, adequate resources must be available for police, prosecutors and public defense. This timely, incisive and important book by Professor Norman Lefstein looks carefully at one leg of the justice system's "three-legged stool"public defenseand the chronic overload of cases faced by public defenders and other lawyers who represent the indigent. Fortunately, the publication does far more than bemoan the current lack of adequate funding, staffing and other difficulties faced by public defense systems in the U.S. and offers concrete suggestions for dealing with these serious issues.

"Project of the American Bar Association, Criminal Justice Standards Committee, Criminal Justice Section"--T.p. verso.

Contents: (1) Introduction: Time and Adolescence; Policy and Practice; (2) The History of Court Delay; (3) The Causes and Effects of Delayed Justice; (4) Controlling Court Delay: Legal/Professional Efforts; Managerial Efforts; (5) Controlling Juvenile Court Delay: Constitutional Provisions; Limiting Due Process for Juveniles; Legislation and Rules in the Juvenile Court; (6) Recent Trends in Delinquency Case Processing Time; (7) Delay Reduction Efforts in Three Juvenile Courts; (8) Conclusions; (9) References; Cases Cited; (10) Appendices. Charts and tables.

On March 18, 1963, in one of its most significant legal decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders. In a book that combines the sweep of history with the intimate details of individual lives and legal cases, veteran reporter Karen Houppert movingly chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on Gideon’s promise. There is the harrowing saga of a young man who is charged with involuntary vehicular homicide in Washington State, where overextended public defenders juggle impossible caseloads, forcing his defender to go to court to protect her own right to provide an adequate defense. In Florida, Houppert describes a public defender’s office, loaded with upward of seven hundred cases per attorney, and discovers the degree to which Clarence Earl Gideon’s promise is still unrealized. In New Orleans, she follows the case of a man imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a crime he didn’t commit, finding a public defense system already near collapse before Katrina and chronicling the harrowing months after the storm, during which overworked volunteers and students struggled to get the system working again. In Georgia, Houppert finds a mentally disabled man who is to be executed for murder, despite the best efforts of a dedicated but severely overworked and underfunded capital defender. Half a century after Anthony Lewis’s award-winning Gideon’s Trumpet brought us the story of the court case that changed the American justice system, Chasing Gideon is a crucial book that provides essential reckoning of our attempts to implement this fundamental constitutional right.

Gratuitous Angst in White America presents a new criminological theory that explains the racialized experiences of white people. Unlike orthodox traditions that assume whiteness as normative or progressive traditions that center the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed, the theory of whiteness and crime flips those perspectives and turns a lens toward white people’s lived experiences and the ideologies of whiteness. The theory of whiteness and crime answers two overarching questions: How does being white impact one’s likelihood of engaging in deviant, criminal, and/or violent behaviors? And, why are white people treated differently than other racial and ethnic groups by the criminal legal system? Through the application of a critical whiteness perspective to criminology, the theory of whiteness and crime is an intersectional and integrated framework that explains within (and between) group differences in negative behaviors and entanglements with the criminal legal system. This book examines the racialized history of America to contextualize the current racial strife in society and inform a more nuanced theoretical approach to explaining disparities. The reader will gain a socio-historical understanding of the depths of the current divides and insight into how such are perpetuated and potentially dismantled. Students will see connections between various theoretical traditions and an application of theory to current social conditions. Researchers will acquire a new theoretical foundation and propositions to ground empirical work that will fill extensive gaps in the criminological literature. And policy makers will see how oversights in understanding the depths of historical significance perpetuate and increase disparities and disadvantages, which are counter to a pursuit of justice. Written in a compelling and direct way, this book will appeal to those in criminology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, political science, cultural studies, psychology, criminal justice, law, and beyond. Gratuitous Angst in White America is essential for those seeking a more complete understanding of the associations between race and crime and those who want to remedy those disparities. In the end, it is more than a new theory of crime, it is a call to action for all willing to hear.